Victoria: Having seen Chris Craddock’s Moving Along(during this year’s SPARK Festival at the Belfry) and Ha! (At the 2008 Fringe, co-written by local favourite Wes Borg), I was really looking forward to catching this show. While I wasn’t disappointed, I wasn’t completely satisfied, either.
Even with a bum knee, Jimmy Hogg doesn’t slow down.
The Brit’s one-man show, which revolves around his journey from a young boy riding around on a BMX named after a short-lived TV series about a well-armed motorcycle to his first sexual adventure, is a fast-paced romp. Hogg is a gifted performer, and his relationship with the audience at this performance demonstrated his love for simply talking to - and with - his audience.
Victoria: @LIFE explores the exclusive lives of video gamers in an attempt to create a window into their beyond-messed-up “reality”—you know, being a superhero, saving the world, having big breasts . . . that sort of thing. While the premise is very in-the-now, the play fails to engage the audience and doesn’t live up to its potential.
Victoria: While Rob Gee manages to turn psycho therapy into a Fringe show in Fruitcake it appears that Edmonton's Chris Craddock has taken the opposite tact, and turned a Fringe show into psycho therapy in his solo performance Moving Along.
Victoria: Too late an addition to make it into the hard copy version of The Fringe flyer this last minute replacement show might just be this year's best Fringe success story. After just two shows Rob Gee's Sunday night performance at the Victoria Events Centre was close to capacity, and one suspects the rest of his run will be turning people away at the door. So book your tickets now, get there early, do what (or who) you have to do, but don't miss out on a piece of this Fruitcake.
Victoria: You wouldn’t guess it from its boring, humdrum write-up in the fringe brochure, but Fall Fair is most likely the best show you’re going to see this year. Jayson McDonald, who has been a, if not ‘the’, fringe favourite for the past two years is back and brilliant, playing an assortment of characters all converging on the last open day of the local fair.
Victoria: Friday night’s opening of Like a Virgin was packed and turning away people even 30 minutes before show time. And seeing the performance, you can understand why. Jimmy Hogg’s exaggerated-for-comedic-effect sexual history/biography is piss-your-pants hilarious.
Victoria: A tale of one woman’s battle with the darkness inside her, In and Out of the Dark is Scoli’s journey to reclaim her joy. Shantelle Simone Laundry acts as the judge, darkness and light in this physical performance piece and her quick and fluid movements keep your eye, but unfortunately not your attention. Her oddball, half-mime, half-clown make-up fizzles into absurdity and the over-acting of particular moments loses any tenderness the play might have had.
Victoria: To speak in first person for a moment, I’d like to think I saw Imprint the way most of its audience will: without the knowledge of dance to appreciate it formally or the vocabulary to talk about it accurately. Despite my handicaps, however, Imprint was nothing short of spellbinding.
Victoria: Meet Comrade Lavrentti Pavlovich Beria (Dennis Eberts). He appears nowhere in official Soviet history, but that never stopped him from bugging Churchill and Roosevelt’s bedrooms at Yalta. Or from sharing their secrets with Stalin over dinner. Opposite this boisterous intelligence kingpin is Anna (Christine Karpiak), a widowed American sent to interview Beria for the Washington Post. Unless, of course, she’s lying about that . . .
